xxiii. Given what we have said earlier about the observational perspective, it is interesting that Merleau-Ponty's explanation specifically addresses the distinction between the child's perception of the other's image and his or her own:
Why does the specular image of one's own body develop later than that of the other body? According to Wallon (whose analysis we are following here), it is because the problem to be solved is much more difficult in the case of one's own body. The child is dealing with two visual experiences of his father [following Wallon's example]: the experience he has from looking at him and that which comes from the mirror. Of his own body, on the other hand, the mirror image is his only complete visual evidence. He can easily look at his feet and his hands but not at his body as a whole. (1964, 129)
Not without relation here is Penny's insistence on the user's capacity to see (parts of) his or her body as he or she experiences the virtual world of Traces; as he points out, this capacity differentiates CAVE environments from HMD VR: "When I first used a CAVE, I was fascinated with the visceral sensation of collisions with virtual objects. I realized that part of the disembodying quality of HMD VR was because when you look down, your body is not there! In a CAVE, you see your body colliding with virtual objects" (Penny).
In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's understanding supports Freud's suggestion, in The Ego and the Id, that the “ego is first and foremost a bodily ego” and that “the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body" (Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. J. Riviere [New York: Norton, 1960], 16.) Specifically, Merleau-Ponty's explanation for the doubling-rather than identity—of the interoceptive body and the specular body emphasizes the independent existence, and indeed preexistence, of the interoceptive body. It thus stands opposed to readings, like that of Judith Butler, which take Freud's concept of the ego as “the projection of the surface of the body" in the other direction—that is, which render the body an effect of the creation of the body ego. See Butler 1993, Chapter 1.
xxv. See Laplanche, Jean and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis.
xxvi. Merleau-Ponty's discussion of doubling via the magic power or the image foregrounds the corporeal dimension of sensibility:
Childhood is never radically liquidated; we never completely eliminate the corporeal condition that gives us, in the presence of a mirror, the impression of finding in it something of ourselves. This magic belief, which at first gives the specular image the value not of a simple reflection, of an “image” in the proper sense, but rather of a "double" of·oneself—this belief never totally disappears. It re-forms itself in the emotional make-up of the adult. (1964,138)
NOTES
xxiv.
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